Persona 5
by José "Ze1598" Costa / Playtime: 95 hours / Completed the story Introduction Persona 5 is a role-playing video game developed by Atlus for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. Persona 5 is chronologically the sixth installment in the Persona series, which is part of the larger Megami Tensei franchise. In this installment the main characters, dubbed as the Phantom Thieves, try to change the hearts of adults with twisted desires, in an attempt to reform Japan’s society. Gameplay Persona 5 has two completely different sides of gameplay: the first is the daily life of the main character, who’s a teenage boy who had to change cities and start attending a different high school due to his one year probation. During this, while controlling the main character players will do things like hanging out with friends, trying to raise social stats such as kindness or knowledge, improving relationships with the confidants (which are the other members of the Phantom Thieves or characters relevant to the story/turn out to be quite useful in terms of selling items/unlocking bonuses for the Phantom Thief side of the gameplay) or just simply working at part-times to earn some money. On the flipside, the main character along with his Phantom Thieves peers will invade corrupted adults’ Palaces in order to trigger a change of heart and make them atone for their sins. These Palaces are born from the twisted desires of those adults and their appearance reflect said desires and their interpretation of what surrounds these adults in the real world (due note these palaces are only accessible in the Metaverse, which is where personas and all this ‘superpowers’ can actually show themselves and be used). For example, the very first Palace is created from the character’s Physical Education teacher distorted desires and sense of being needed in the school, which in turn turns the school into his own castle inside the Metaverse. For the gameplay here, it’s a typical dungeon crawler along with turn-based combat. Let me explain: the player has, at a time, a group of 4 characters (only 3 are of choice because the main character isn’t) with the objective to steal the palace’s treasure (this is what triggers the change of heart and always leads to facing the Palace’s owner as a final boss before completing each Palace). While navigating through each Palace the players find Shadows (which are just human-sized enemies, that can be ambushed by getting close to them and pressing ‘X’ to start combat) who turn into Personas either when ambushed or when the Shadows themselves actually find the player and the characters get ambushed. Depending on what happens, the players can either be at a huge advantage or at a huge disadvantage. When players ambush Shadows, it’s much much easier to defeat the enemies, because only after each character performs an action the Shadows are allowed to attack or use a skill. This is absolutely crucial because by attacking first, the characters may use the corresponding elemental attack to “down” an enemy, and when all enemies are “downed” it’s possible to “Hold Up” to a Persona and either “capture” them (which effectively can turn them into another Persona the main character can use when successful) or either perform an All-Out Attack which deals massive amounts of damage to all enemies, which most of the time means the end of the battle. On the other hand, if the player gets ambushed then the situation will be completely reversed. It’s not that the players can suffer and All-Out Attack, but it can be quite the dangerous situation for two simple reasons: each time either a character or an enemy “downs” someone else it awards them another action, and the second reason is that if the main character is defeated (read as its HP falls below 0) it’s game over and the player is forced to return to its most recent save file (which can erase quite a bit of progress, because inside Palaces the only places where it’s allowed to save is inside Safe Rooms, which aren’t as common as that, there’s only about one Safe Room per floor in a Palace). In the sreenshot below you can see what kind of actions characters can use during their turn: (melee) attack, gun attack, Persona (which allows to use a Persona’s skill or change the Persona the main character is using; due note Persona skills consume SP), guard against an attack, use an item to heal HP or status ailments, and order, which is mostly to call the escape option or further in the game to switch party members during combat. Besides all this, there’s always a deadline to steal each treasure, which if it isn’t abode to will result in game over. So, from this, results the constant in-game struggle: “should I spend time with X today or should we go to the Palace today?” or “should I just spend my time alone reading a book to raise my social stats or go work at my part-time to earn some money?”. Besides the normal palaces, there’s also the “common Palace” Mementos, which is sort of an amalgamation of the general public’s desires. This, until a certain point in the game, serves as a sort of side-quest-y and optional ever-expanding dungeon, which lets players fight against Shadows to essentially farm experience and items, or just complete side-quests by defeating certain stronger Shadows. Due to some problems I couldn't capture gameplay, so I'll just post the trailer here: Difficulty From my personal experience the game is quite fair, as long as you can manage your party’s Personas and elemental weaknesses and strengths. However, in the last 10-15 hours of the story the game decides to start throwing very strong enemies at you with little breathing room between each, which may lead to some frustration by depleting your SP, HP and items at a very fast pace, or even just forcing to lower the difficulty level, because doing this actually awards quite a bit more of experience points per battle and you will deal more damage and receive less damage. Visual & Sound design Now this is my favorite part of this review because let me tell something about the visual and sound design of Persona 5: it’s the absolute best of 2017, period. Visually, the aesthetics used are some of the most creative and good-looking I’ve seen in quite some time, and the soundtrack is also absolutely amazing. From the music playing while you’re commuting trains to school to the music when you’re ready to invade a palace to steal its treasure it just couldn’t be any better. I’ll put it bluntly, the core of the game is quite good, but without the visual style and the sound design it has, Persona 5 would just be another RPG, nowhere near the masterpiece it is. Achievements & Trophies It’s not that Persona 5’s trophies are the hardest to get in the world, it’s rather the time it consumes to get. Below I’ve chosen the three trophies that represent this the best: Verdict Persona 5 is quite the complete package: when you watch the first Palace crumbling to pieces after you steal its treasure and then watch Kamoshida have a change of heart and admit all his crimes you’d be ready for credits on any other game, but not on Persona. This is just the tip of the iceberg and what awaits you is an incredible story full of interesting characters, each with their own motivations and background stories. However, such mechanics like the low number of Safe Rooms inside Palaces create larger gameplay sections, which results in raising the risk of a game over, which in turn raises the chance of making player progression meaningless. Things like this are what restrain Persona 5 from being a perfect 20/20 videogame unfortunately. Final score: 17/20 Category:Reviews